Indian Hindu leader against inter-religious violence bill

India's parliament opens its winter session today with the Communal Violence Bill on its agenda. Narendra Modi, prime ministerial candidate for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), defines the bill as a "recipe for disaster" that must be stopped. He has been blamed for deadly violence between Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, which led to the drafting of the bill currently before parliament.

New Delhi
(AsiaNews/Agencies) - India's parliament is set to vet the Communal Violence
Bill - a proposed piece of legislation meant to curb inter-religious violence -
during its winter session, between now and 20 December.

Within the Hindu
ultra-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the leading opposition party, the
bill has come in for criticism. Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat and
the BJP's candidate for prime minister in the upcoming union election, has
called it "a recipe for disaster."

Commissioned by
the National Advisory Council (NAC), which is chaired by Sonia Gandhi, the bill
would give the central government the power to intervene directly in cases of
inter-religious violence, even bypassing state authorities.

The idea of
​​such a law came after the Gujarat
massacres of 2002, when more than 2,000 Muslims died at the hands of
the Hindus. Narendra
Modi himself was blamed for the massacre.

The issue became
an even greater public policy issue in the wake of the anti-Christian pogrom in
Orissa (2008) and the failure of individual States to ensure justice.

Speaking about
the bill, Modi called it "ill-conceived, poorly drafted" and a way to get
votes rather than the expression "of genuine concerns".

According to the
Hindu ultra-nationalist leader, the bill is an attempt to encroach on state
rights.